Saturday, October 26, 2013

Femtoo - New Feature - Scheduling your trackers

Yesterday, a new version of Femtoo was released which included a very useful new feature: Tracker Scheduling.

Tracker Scheduling means that you can now specify when you want your trackers to run, not just how often. This means you can configure your trackers to minimize the number of 'Checks Per Month' you use.

For example, let's say you want to track a niche job board which advertises new positions for jobs and that you know the job positions are posted each morning around 10am. Before, you would have had to create a tracker that runs every 30 minutes and hope that it happens to run soon after 10am to notify you quickly of the latest job positions - this would work, but is far from ideal. With Tracker Scheduling you could simply configure your tracker to run once per day at exactly 10am (or to be safe, sometime shortly after 10am). Now your tracker is using many many fewer 'Checks Per Month' and is checking for content changes exactly when you want.

To use the new Tracker Scheduling feature, create or edit a tracker and click the 'Schedule next run' field. A date and time selection widget should appear and you can select the exact time for the next tracker run. The tracker will then run periodically based on the selected tracker frequency. So in the example above, I would choose a 'tracker frequency' of '24 hours' and I would choose a 'Schedule next run' time of 10:10 am and date as either this day or the next. Once saved, the tracker will run at 10:10am every day.